


Xhind and the Lizard

by brassmanticore (Ilyas)



Series: Xhind series [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Kidfic, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 16:44:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 19,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3985405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilyas/pseuds/brassmanticore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Link to the glossary on my blog, if you need it.  Contains minor spoilers.  http://brassmanticore.tumblr.com/post/119720256169/i-found-the-glossary-document-finally-under-a</p></blockquote>





	1. Flying Fish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Link to the glossary on my blog, if you need it. Contains minor spoilers. http://brassmanticore.tumblr.com/post/119720256169/i-found-the-glossary-document-finally-under-a

On mornings when the weather was clear, Riyamn came up to the roof with me to breathe the clean morning air while I fed the chickens. The year we were seven, we were finally tall enough that we could see down over the wall around the roof, if we held onto the edge and stood on our toes and pulled ourselves up a little. We looked down into the alleys, and watched the egg seller go by, and the firewood seller, and white-robed men in hats on their way to work and children on their way to school.

There was a scrap of bright blue visible in one direction, and I thought it was the sea. Riyamn said that it was probably a roof, the sea was not in that direction, but I made up stories about sailing across the salt sea and the pearl sea and the green sea, and he didn’t stop me. Riyamn looked over another wall and spotted the white dome and minaret of the masjid nearby, where he wanted to lead prayers one day. We had been looking at the minaret for years and I wasn’t that interested in the sight of it, but Riyamn made sure to pick it out every morning for most of that year. He was going to school there after the holy month, and he had talked of little else all summer. I asked Baba if I could go too, and he said it was for boys, and Maghris needed me to help her, but if I was very good he might take me one day.

One morning while it was still early and cool, I was kneeling in a corner of the courtyard with my hand in a kettle, which I was supposed to be scouring with sand. There was burnt rice stuck to the bottom. But I had stopped scrubbing some time ago and was talking with a silver lizard who appeared sometimes.

‘…they do not!’ I whispered.

‘They do! They fly right into boats at certain times of year.’

‘It’s birds that fly.’

‘And occasionally fish.’

‘That’s not what fish do. They swim.’

‘Yes! But sometimes they take to the air. They have special fins like wings, it’s a remarkable thing to see. On my honour as a lizard.’

Baba unlocked the gate with an audible clank and stood rattling the keys and yelled at Riyamn to hurry up. He must’ve come out of his shop without my noticing. I ran across the courtyard, bare feet slapping on the warm stones, and wrapped my arms around his legs. He swung me up and tossed me in the air and caught me again.

‘How’s my little gazelle this morning?’ He asked. ‘Good?’

‘Yes! Ba, do you think fish fly sometimes?’

‘Not usually.’

‘But sometimes?’

‘I’ve heard that some do, and maybe it’s true, but I never saw it myself. Abel would know.’ Abel was Dr. Kanafani. ‘Why?’

‘Oh. I just wondered.’ Maghris was the only person who knew I talked to the lizard. She had said I might, as long as I did not let anyone know I was doing it.

‘You wonder too much,’ Ba said.

Riyamn appeared in his crisp beige robe and white tasselled hat, and Baba set me down. Maghris touched my hand and began to sign, _It’s time for Riyamn to go, come away_ \- and while I was looking at her, the gate slammed shut. I was in the courtyard with Maghris, and Ba and Riyamn were on the other side of the wall, and they'd left me behind.

‘Maghris, let me out, I'm going too!’ I jumped up to try to reach the lock, but it was too high, and I didn’t have the key. I threw myself against the gate, but it barely even rattled. Maghris pulled me away and signed at me to come do the sweeping.

‘No, Ba said I could go! He said, let me out!’ I threw myself against the gate again. Maghris _hmph_ ed and walked away, and I threw my shoulder against the gate until it hurt too much and then sat on the ground and cried. Maghris swept the courtyard herself and ignored me.

It had never occurred to me that I might not be going to school with Riyamn. Of course I was going! We did everything together. We had never been apart before, and I was terrified they had taken him away and I would never see him again.


	2. No Use for Reading

The sun was up over the courtyard wall when I decided Maghris had forgotten about me, and it was getting hot. I went under the trees in the centre of the courtyard and hid in the shade among the mint, breathing in the tingly scent of it and wiping my puffy eyes.

Maghris poured a kettle of hot water into the laundry tub, and then came towards the garden. I crawled through the greenery towards the stairs and hoped she wouldn’t see me, but she caught me. I squirmed but her grip was strong and she hauled me to the laundry tub, plomped me down in front of a pile of stained garments, and handed me a scrap of soap. I didn’t speak to her. I was angry with her for not letting me go with Riyamn.

Maghris took her hands out of the soapy water and signed _are you feeling sick?_ I pretended not to notice.

 _Answer me Xhind, or I will get angry._ The sign for my name was hands clapped to imitate the click at the beginning, hands held in a fan-shape to imitate the jan-repelling tree I was named for.

I signed, _yes._ I did feel ill, and my head ached, but it was probably from crying.

 _You’re not like Riyamn_ , Maghris signed. _School’s not for nusjan_. She stuck her hands back in the laundry tub. The sign for nusjan was the sign for person, two fingers walking, followed by a crooked finger held next to one’s temple like a curving horn.

I scrubbed at a spot on a shirt rather vehemently. Riyamn never had to do chores. I didn’t see what was so different about me that I had to stay home. So I had two bumps on my head. Orrnah had an extra little toe but nobody made her go up on the roof with the chickens when people came to visit.

 _You’ve no use for reading, and you wouldn’t like it anyways_ , Maghris continued. _You hate sitting still, imagine having to do it all morning._

I didn’t actually know what reading was, but if Riyamn was doing it then I wanted to do it too.

 _But I’ll never see him again_. I sniffled.

 _Of course you’ll see him again! He’ll be back before lunch. Oh child of mine, whatever made you think that?_ Maghris gathered me into a hug and patted my back with wet soapy hands. I couldn’t answer her question, I just felt like the world was ending. 

* * *

 

Riyamn came back with Ba after the midday prayer, and I pretended not to see him as he trudged across the courtyard and up the stairs. He went straight to his room and closed the door. Ba went through the door from the courtyard into his shop for a while, and then he went upstairs too, and everything was quiet.  Maghris and I went to our little room off the kitchen and lay on our mat.

Our room was an enchanting place when I was a little. It was built in the shade of the thick stone wall out of bamboo poles clothed with grape vines. Green and golden light filtered through the leaves, lizards skittered along the stone blocks and hunted spiders, and grapes cascaded from the ceiling in summer and fall. It was the beginning of autumn then and hot even in the shade. Maghris snored softly and I lay and flicked flies away and wondered how I could become like Riyamn, so that I could go to school with him. Laundry was boring and made my hands wrinkle and my back ache.

I heard a rustle in the leaves near the ground, and turned my head. A green lizard darted away. It was just an ordinary lizard, then, not the one I wanted. ‘Silver lizard, silver lizard, silver lizard,’ I whispered. If you said someone’s name three times, their soul would hear you, and they would come, if you were patient and you didn’t do it too often.

Ba came down and stood in the door to our room and said he was very displeased with me. Who had told me that I would be going to school?

'You did.  You said if I was good I could go.'

'No I didn't.  And Anu Riyamn says you were very bad this morning.  I don't want to hear about you behaving like that again.'

'But Ba- '

'That's enough!'  He was looming and red-faced and frightening me, and I hoped Maghris would wake up and comfort and protect me, but she never did, even after he left. She just snored.


	3. Charms

Anu Riyamn had a charm for everything; a charm for calling the rain and a charm for driving out sickness and a charm to ward off the evil eye and a charm to ripen apricots and a charm to get rid of mites. The charm for getting rid of wool mites was my favourite. To perform it, you dragged the mattresses up to the roof and unpicked the stitches holding them closed and spread out the stuffing, and then Anu Riyamn said the charm and in the afternoon you stuffed the wool back into the mattresses and they were all nice and fluffy and sun-smelling.

 

Spreading the wool out was my favourite part. Maghris and Anu Riyamn hauled the heavy mattresses up to the roof late enough in the morning that the brick was dew-free and warming up. That year I was seven, Umayn would have been a baby. Only Amnah, who was nine, me, and Orrnah, who was four, were old enough to help. Riyamn was at school, but he hadn't been going for long enough that I was confident he would return each day.

I fed the chickens and Amnah kept Orrnah occupied and we all waited impatiently while the adults picked the stitches on one end of each mattress, careful not to break the thread – because if they did, a family tie would be broken in the coming year. It seemed to me that a family tie already had been broken: Riyamn was leaving, and I was sure it was because I’d broken a thread last year when Maghris had let me help pull them. That was why we kids weren’t allowed to take the threads out anymore, I thought.

 

We pulled the first of the wool stuffing out, and then they upended the mattresses, one at a time, and we converged on the loose end and stood inside it and pulled out the rest of the wool. Amnah elbowed me in the eye on the first mattress, and knocked me down on the second. She was much bigger than me, and had started resenting me. I didn’t know why, she hated me just because as far as I knew.

 

The wool was hard-packed at first. It was like pulling cob out of the mattresses, except it left grease on your hands instead of mud and bits of straw. It was hard-packed and heavy and slow to emerge, but then once we’d pulled out enough, it started to fall out in dense clods and thump us on the head. Once all the stuffing was out, it was getting hot and the baby was cranky and Anu Riyamn took her and went back downstairs. We broke up the clods and spread the wool out on the warm bricks so the sun could get to it all.

 

Or that’s what we were supposed to do. Maghris let us play in the heaps of loose wool for a while after we’d pulled it all apart. I buried Orrnah in a pile and walked around searching and calling for her and then right when I was at her pile, she burst out of it. I yelped like I was scared and she laughed and I dived into the musty-smelling wool. It was my turn to hide. Amnah very pointedly spread her pile out like she was supposed to.

 

I peeked out of the wool pile and watched Orrnah run around the roof ‘searching’ for me and tossing wool in the air. She got too close to the edge and some wool fell down into the courtyard. Maghris clapped her hands and motioned to her to stop and come away from the edge. I raised my head up so that Orrnah would see me and come find me. I thought she had forgotten what game we’d been playing.

 

‘You make a good sheep,’ Amnah said to me. Maghris cleared her throat in warning. ‘No really, I mean it, wool looks good on you. Too bad it doesn’t match the smelly old wool on your head.’

 

I ignored her and wiggled my shoulders. Orrnah saw and shrieked and ran towards me. ‘Come away from there, Orrnah.’ Amnah held out her arms. Orrnah wasn’t even looking at her. She ran up the wool pile and jumped onto my back and threw her arms around my neck. I got a grip on her legs and stood up – with difficulty, she was a heavy kid – and ran across the roof with her on my back. She laughed so hard she could barely breathe.

 

‘No, a pack animal.’ Amnah said loudly. ‘I’d say donkey, but donkeys don’t have horns. Some freak halfbreed, maybe.’

 

I stopped laughing. We were having fun, and she just had to go and ruin it. She couldn’t let me have anything she didn’t have. Maghris could clear her throat all she wanted, but she couldn’t make Amnah stop talking.

 

‘Why did you say that?’ I asked. ‘We’re just playing.’

 

‘Orrnah’s going to catch something from you – don’t look at me like that, she will, it’s true, and you look at me like you’re cursing me. I bet you cast spells on us at night.’

 

‘I don’t need to curse you, you’re already ugly. But maybe I’ll make you extra ugly,’ I said, and Maghris straightened up and crossed the roof in a few swift steps. I was in for it. She smacked me on the bottom hard, caught me by the arm, and hauled me across the roof and down the stairs. She stopped squeezing my arm so hard halfway down the flight of stairs, but didn’t let me go. We went into one of the empty rooms on the first floor and she shut the door.

 

_I’m sorry I hit you_ , Maghris signed. I didn’t care, I'd known she would do it. _But that was stupid, Xhind. You must never say you’ll curse anyone, ever, they already think that about you._ Her face was very serious and very sad.

 

‘So why not say it.’

 

_They think that about all of us,_ she clarified, _but if you ever give this family reason to think you yourself are really doing witchcraft, they will get rid of you. They will take you away from me and sell you and you will either die like a rat or live a long time, but you’ll wish you’d died._

‘But what am I supposed to do? She’s so mean all the time. She can do anything she wants and nobody says anything to her, it’s not fair.’

 

_Nothing is ever fair. Recite prayers in your head, or all the sorts of clouds you know, or count backwards. In a few years she will be married and gone._

 

A few years was so impossibly far in the future as to be imaginary. She might as well have said a hundred hundred years. I couldn’t even wait till next week; there was only now, and now was terrible.

 

_She’s trying to make you react, so just ignore her. You have to. Promise me you will, Xhind._

‘I promise,’ I said reluctantly.  I couldn’t refuse to promise, but my promise was a lie. There was no way I could not react.

 

Maghris gave me two palm-leaf brooms, a big one and a small one for corners, to sweep the empty rooms and then she left.

 

I muttered to myself while I swept. Anu Riyamn had a charm for everything, but I didn’t know many of them and I didn’t know any that would work for me. I was chanting ‘silver lizard, silver lizard, silver lizard,’ over and over again, because I needed to ask him something. Yes, if you used the summoning charm too much it would stop working, but I hardly ever called the lizard.

 

He didn’t teach me the calling charm, we’d all learned it from stories, but he taught me the one to say when I was sad. I hadn’t said it the day before, because at first I wasn’t sad, I was angry, and then I forgot. But now the sadness was pressing into the backs of my eyes, and I started repeating the words of the spell for relieving sadness instead of the spell for calling. I didn’t think it worked, but the silver lizard told me to say it, and so I did.

 

I finished that room and moved on to Riyamn’s. He was the only person to have a room to himself, because he needed quiet, and because he was a boy and everyone else was a girl, except Ba, but Ba only slept in the house sometimes and he was an adult anyhow so he didn’t count.

 

Riyamn’s room had a bed raised up off the floor, for his lungs, and the floor painted to prevent dust. Maghris cleaned it every day, so it wasn’t hardly dusty at all. But I swept it anyways, because she would know if I didn’t.

 

At the foot of Riyamn’s bed was a chest made of reddish wood patched on one corner with regular brown wood. I traced the faded paintings of lions and antelope and hunters with spears, and then I opened the latch and breathed in the smell of the wood. Inside were Riyamn’s ordinary homespun clothes, and below that his last year’s robe and sash and his dagger and the thing I was hoping to find: the round hat he’d gotten a year ago. It was a foreign hat.  I’d seen boys in the alleys wearing them. Anu Riyamn hadn’t wanted him to wear it, but Ba told her it was what Bilarnis wore, he would have to wear it in public, but he could still wear his own clothes at home. And so she had him buy a plain white hat and embroidered it with blue and with blessings and charms for protection.

 

I had wanted it from the moment I saw it. It was too big for him then and he let me try it on, but when I asked him to let me wear it until he grew into it, he said it was only for boys. I said that was stupid, and he said I was stupid and snatched it back.

 

I set it on top of my head and squeezed my fingers in around the edges to try to pull it down to my ears so it would stay but it didn’t fit. I took the hat off and pulled my thick headband down around my neck. The hat wouldn’t go all the way to the top of my ears like it did on Riyamn – my head was bigger and rounder than his – but it sat nicely. It was light. I imagined I must look very dashing and grown up in such a hat. It didn’t chafe behind my ears and at my nape or press uncomfortably on my horns like the headband did.

 

Oh yes, my horns. I had two hard horn buds just back from my hairline, about level with my eyebrows. Maghris came up with various braid patterns and hairstyles that would cover them, but I wore a headband too, as my hair wasn’t that thick. The embroidery didn’t make me hate it any less.

 

I might wear Riyamn’s hat in secret this once (and maybe on other days, if I could slip away) but I would never be able to go with him, or to have my own hat to wear, unless the silver lizard could help me. I put the hat away and went to sweep the next room.

 

The next room was where Anu Riyamn, Amnah, and Orrnah slept when Ba wasn’t there. The sun had risen over the courtyard walls, and when I swept the dust rose into the beam of light let in by the door. I flicked more dust up to watch it hit the light and suddenly gleam bright gold and swirl around, never really going anywhere.

 

I sensed someone watching me and turned and the silver lizard was watching me from on top of the pegs where clothes were usually hung.

 

‘What took you so long?’ I demanded.

 

‘I beg your pardon?’ The silver lizard said.

 

‘I called yesterday, but you never came.’

 

‘I wasn't around.’

 

‘Where were you, silver lizard?’ I asked. In the stories, lizards were required to tell you their secrets, if you asked. So far it hadn’t worked with this lizard, but I kept trying.

 

‘Inky depths, crystal palaces, the council-halls of kings.’ He always said something like that.

 

‘And what did you do there, silver lizard?’ I asked.

 

‘My lips are sealed, as ever.’

 

I laughed.

 

‘And what have you been doing, little girl?’ The lizard asked. I stopped laughing.

 

In stories, you must not tell lizards anything you don’t want everyone in the world to know, but this wasn’t a secret. ‘I was going to go with Riyamn, but now I’m not allowed. Ba promised, but now he says I can’t because he says I can’t, but Maghris says it’s because I’m nusjan. So I need a charm to make me not nusjan. A boy human would be best, but a girl will be okay too, I hope, as long as I’m not nusjan anymore.’ I took a breath. It was difficult to judge expressions on lizards, but the silver lizard was just looking at me silently, so I ploughed on with the magic words. ‘Teach me the spell that does what I desire, silver lizard.’

 

The lizard licked his eyeball, then his other eyeball. ‘You desire to be no longer nusjan.’

 

‘Yes,’ I said.

 

‘I can’t make you a boy human, but I will teach you something that will benefit you.’

 

I thought ‘benefit’ meant ‘make bigger’. ‘There’s a spell to be a _grown-up_ human?’ That would be a powerful spell indeed. I was wary now. ‘What will it cost?’

 

‘There is no such spell, Xhind. You can’t become someone else, you just have to do the best you can as you are.’

 

‘What,’ I said. ‘That’s not true – it can’t be. I don’t want to be someone _else_ , I want to be _me_ , just _different_.’

 

‘Nevertheless. I wish it were otherwise, but it is truly impossible,’ the silver lizard said.

 

‘It isn’t, look!’ I took my broom from where it leaned against the wall and flicked dust into the air. ‘See!’ I pointed at the swirling motes of dust. ‘It turned to gold. Dust turns to gold, rice turns to cooked rice, wheat turns to bread. It’s easy.’ Okay, making bread is not easy, but we did it every day.

 

‘It’s lovely, but it’s an effect of the light. It didn’t actually turn to gold, it’s still sand and detritus, it just looks gold-ish when the sunlight hits it,’ the lizard said.

 

‘Looking human-ish will be good enough. It’s not a big change. Don’t you know a charm that will make the bumps on my head invisible? There’s charms for taking off mites and warts, there must be one for this too.’

 

‘Which spell is that?’ The lizard asked.

 

‘Don’t you know it?’ I was beginning to wonder if the lizard knew very many spells at all. ‘It’s Anu Riyamn’s, it goes - ‘ I rattled off the string of rhyming nonsense.

 

The lizard stopped me. ‘Do you know what those words mean?’

 

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think they’re real words.’

 

‘Those are some of the names of God, in Bilarni. They’re real words, and very powerful ones, although it’s unclear how much power they hold to someone who doesn’t understand them. That’s not really a spell or charm as you say – what would you say is the difference between a charm and a spell? No never mind, I’ll ask you later – it’s more like a prayer or an invocation.’

 

The silver lizard spoke Bardaket well but it was not his first language like it was mine. I didn’t care what the proper name for it was. ‘So do you know one that will work on my head?’

 

‘I think that’s what your headband is for, isn’t it?’ The lizard asked.

 

‘It’s so the angels don’t look down on my head and stay away from our house,’ I said.  The bumps were bigger than they used to be.

 

‘And does it work?’

 

‘I guess,’ I said.  'Angels are invisible so I've never seen any.'

 

‘Well then, there you are,’ the lizard said, as though the matter was settled.

 

‘But I’m still nusjan. Everyone knows I’m nusjan. I have to be _not_ nusjan.’

 

‘If there was any such spell, I would tell it to you. But there isn’t,’ the lizard said.

 

I remembered something. ‘You said you could teach me something better. What?’

 

‘I can teach you a prayer for patience.’ The lizard sounded slightly sheepish, like he knew that was both a foolishly inadequate measure and regretted having said it.

 

‘So I have to stay like this?’

 

‘You were born nusjan and you will be nusjan as long as you live, yes.’

 

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t. There must be a spell, you just don’t know it, but I will find it.’

 

‘There are lots of nusjan, you will eventually grow up and it will be easier then –‘

 

‘No!’ I started saying nonsense words like Anu Riyamn’s to myself. I would eventually hit on the right combination. The lizard watched and when there was no noticeable effect I began to feel foolish, so I picked up my broom and began to sweep. When I finished sweeping the room I looked around, but he was gone.


	4. Holy Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning on this chapter for child abuse. You can skip this chapter if you want and understand the rest of the story just fine.

It was late afternoon and beams of light were shooting down from between the buildings and turning the plastered walls pinkish orange. Anu Riyamn said the words over the wool and we packed it back into the mattresses. The adults carried them back downstairs into the bedrooms. That was one day of wool-airing, but there would be another. There were still the cushions from the guest room to be done.

 

I followed Maghris down to the kitchen and peeled tubers while she got dinner ready. Anu Riyamn came down before it was ready, and told me to bring her the holy water, as casually as she would tell me to pour a cup of tea. I brought her the bottle, feeling like my body was numb and walking around while I was very small and huddled inside it, steering. She told me to put the poker in the fire, and I did, but I thought I might vomit. I must not vomit.

 

She flicked water from the sacred well on me and wrapped her hands around my skull and squeezed tightly while reciting the spell to cast out the demon that made me behave badly. I felt dizzy, as I always did when she exorcised me, and my head hurt. I suppose that was the demon leaving my body. She told me to hold out my arms and I did, palms up, hardly shaking at all, and she took the poker out of the fire and laid it across my forearms, where there were already many puckered pale lines. It was to keep the demon out. I tried not to flinch, but I always did.

 

‘If you ever harm any of my children, or threaten to again, I will leave you outside the gates and may the dogs eat your corpse,’ she said coldly. ‘Do you understand.’

 

‘Yes,’ my tongue said, from far away.

 

‘Good.’ She turned to Maghris. ‘Is that ready?’

 

She left. Maghris stretched her back. I saw her hands moving but I didn’t look. I was trying very hard not to cry, because I was too big for that now and crying would prove the demon was still in my body making me misbehave and if Anu Riyamn saw, I would have to be exorcised again. Maghris had said to recite all the prayers I knew but I couldn’t remember any. I counted as high as I could and then took a basket and went to the courtyard to pull weeds from between the bricks.

 

The demons made me want to answer back and drink water on fast days and sleep past dawn and say I’d swept everything when I hadn’t. There were a lot of demons. Other children got them too sometimes, but not as often as I did.

 

Amnah had two little pale burn scars on the insides of her wrists, from times she’d been bad, I suppose, I don’t remember, she was a few years older than me and there were a lot of demons. She had a round burn scar from a hot metal cup applied to her stomach after she’d eaten too many green grapes when nobody was looking and had diarrhoea for a long time. The diarrhoea probably wasn’t caused by the grapes, or by demons like we thought in those days; it was probably caused by the water. I remember how Amnah screamed as Anu Riyamn applied the cup to drive the illness-causing demon out of her belly and writhed and tried to bite Maghris, who was kneeling on her shoulders. Anu Riyamn told her to shut up, the angels were watching and writing down every time she was bad. The neighbour kids peered through the fence.

 

We were still living in a woven palm house outside the city, surrounded by a fence of sticks and more palm driven into the sand. The house got flattened every wet season and had to be rebuilt after the winds carried the rain away again. We spent the better part of two months of every year huddled shivering under banana leaves, soaking wet and hungry and convinced that God had sent the thunder and lightning to obliterate us for our wickedness, like the people of one of the less successful prophets.      

 

Riyamn had rows of burn scars running down his chest like extra ribs. Just after we moved into the brick house, a demon curled up in his lungs and made a nest of sticky green. His mother tried all of the remedies she knew of, and he never complained, but eventually the cough cracked his ribs. We were all cranky from being kept up nights by his coughing, but he was more tired, and he could hardly cough any more. His lips and fingernails turned blue, and his mother told his father to just bring a witch, it didn’t matter how much it cost, they could sell me or borrow money, anything, but he was their only son and he must not die.

Ibu Riyamn and the witch arrived suddenly in the evening. Nobody bothered to take me out of sight, so I got a good look at him. He was thin and black, taller than Ba, and wore a black robe and black knitted skullcap. He said something to Maghris, who nodded without leaving her work, and then he crouched down next to us. _Say hello to the - ,_ Maghris started to sign, and then paused _\- man_. She would later invent a sign for ‘doctor.’ He smiled at me and shook my tiny hand in his huge one and said something, but I didn’t understand. He sounded kind, but I wished he would go away because he was large and strange I was hot and dizzy and didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t seen many strangers up close and nobody ever introduced me.

 

‘Yzid?’ Anu Riyamn called from inside the palm house built in the courtyard. The brick house was still being built and the trees in the garden were still planted in cracked jars.

 

‘Yes, cousin.’

 

‘Did you bring the foreign witch?’

 

‘He’s not a witch, he’s a doctor.’ He used a sharp-edged foreign word.

 

‘But did you _bring_ him. Lord above and fire below, just answer the question instead of correcting me all the time.’ She came out of the house, and Ba and the witch filed in.

 

I lay down, shivering, and Maghris put an extra garment on me for a blanket. The baby was crying and coughing wetly and Maghris went off to see to her.

 

I stopped shivering and aching some time later – days later, probably – and the baby was quiet. The whole house was quiet. Some of the cobbles had been removed from the courtyard and there was a little hill in the loose earth there. I stuck my hands into the pile and squeezed the loose, damp red earth into little gritty cakes, which I started to eat. I was hollow with hunger. Anu Riyamn slapped me and called Maghris to take me away. Maghris said that the baby was dead and under the dirt and I shouldn’t play there, but it only made me want to dig down and save the baby from smothering under the dirt. I told Amnah and she said the baby wasn’t really in the dirt, she was in heaven. Anu Riyamn said that it was God’s price for curing her son and she was willing to pay. More children would come, if he willed it: sons to take care of her in her old age, and daughters to carry on her line.

 

Next time we got sick, Anu Riyamn said that branding was only for serious cases, and she didn’t brand Amnah or Riyamn, but she still branded me. It didn’t take me long to realise that apparently I was a serious case every time I acted up or obeyed too slowly.

 

Little Orrnah didn’t have any burn scars at all, because her mother didn’t burn her when she was sick and she’d never been exorcised. Anu Riyamn said she was the sweetest, quietest child she’d ever had and thanked God that the demons passed her by and went straight for me.


	5. Is That The Spell They Use?

Riyamn came up to the roof the next morning while I was feeding the chickens.

 

‘Hi,’ he said.

 

‘Hi.’ I crumbled a piece of stale bread. Hens came running and converged on the crumbs. They never stopped being excited over bread. I was not excited to see Riyamn.  I hadn't talked to him since he started school.

 

He went to the edge of the roof and looked out over the wall into the city. I didn’t join him. I didn’t want to talk to him at all, so I collected the eggs and went back downstairs.

 

I ate and washed dishes and clothes and swept and slept and then did it all over again. I answered everyone politely when they talked to me so that I would not get exorcised again. But I still had nothing to say to Riyamn.

 

_What are you whispering_? Maghris asked me. Umm Riyamn was sitting under the grape arbour with her back to us and her hands busy spinning. Umayn was in the basket next to her and Amnah and Orrnah were playing in the courtyard. Maghris and I were cleaning the ashes out of the firepit.

 

_A prayer_ , I signed back. That was not exactly true.

 

_Pray later, you look like you’re cursing them._

 

This charm wasn’t for them, it was for me. I was searching for the spell that would make me human. In a way, it was a prayer.

 

I was constantly feeling my horns through my headband to see if anything had happened yet. I was sure my horns were getting smaller, and then I was sure they were growing. I wished I could forget about them. I tried to pretend they didn’t exist in order to will them into non-existence, thinking that might be the trick. But that didn’t work either. I gave up hope that I would ever find the spell to make me human.

 

The silver lizard appeared sometimes from among the grape leaves or out of a crack in the brick, and talked to me of water-beetles and strange fish, but never nusjan or witchery. He did not ask if I’d found the spell yet, and I wasn’t going to tell him anything until it had worked.

_You didn’t weed the garden on the far side of the trees_ , Maghris signed. _Go do it now._

‘I’m saving it for when it’s cooler,’ I said.

 

_It’s cool enough now._ It was not yet mid-morning. Riyamn was at school. I could hear Anu Riyamn’s loom clacking upstairs.

 

‘The sun comes right down into the courtyard during the day. I’ll do it in the evening,’ I said.

 

_Be sure you do it tonight, or you’ll be doing it at noon tomorrow._

 

In the evenings, Riyamn brought out his planks covered in looping black lines like baby snakes and read them for Ba. I had been lurking in the garden the past few days trying to figure out how reading worked, but I couldn’t figure it out. How did they know what sounds to make? Was there a spell? I wasn’t going to ask for it, but I couldn’t stand Riyamn knowing how to do a trick I didn’t.

 

‘What are you doing?’

 

I froze, expecting a slap, and then realised it was the silver lizard’s voice. ‘Weeding, shhh,’ I whispered.

 

‘I don’t think the spinach minds if you talk,’ he said, at a normal volume.

 

‘They’ll hear you, shush!’ Nobody else had heard him yet, but I wasn’t sure that I was the only one who could hear him. I looked over at Ba sitting on the bench under the grape arbour with a cup of tea and Riyamn sitting on the ground, reading one syllable at a time. It was a small consolation to me that he wasn’t nearly as good as Ba. Neither of them looked at us.

 

‘Oh, they know you’re here,’ the lizard said.

 

‘Oh.’ So they didn’t consider me worth acknowledging. I should have expected that, but it made me feel even smaller and lower.

 

‘So why is this little meeting important enough to spy on?’

 

‘I want to know how they’re doing it.’

 

‘Doing what?’

 

‘That’s not even our language, he learns so fast and I don’t know how he does it. What if he’s smarter than me now? He’s taller than me, what if he got smarter?’ I did not say, _what if that’s why Ba and Anu love him more than me?_ Riyamn was pale and human and learned everything so fast and never wanted to bite or hit anyone. I could never hope to be so perfect, and while I had loved him before, I was starting to hate him too. And he had betrayed me by going to school alone.

 

But it was like the lizard had read my mind, because he said, ‘Knowing how to do something isn’t the same as being intelligent or good or lovable, Xhind. It’s just a skill. Most people could learn too. But you must know how to do something Riyamn doesn’t.’

 

All of the things I knew how to do could be done by anyone – sweeping, washing things, carrying things, feeding the chickens. I could see farther than Riyamn, which made me feel useful, but it wasn’t anything I did by knowing how, it just happened, and it wasn’t important. By the reverence everyone gave it, I thought reading was important.

 

‘Would you like me to teach you the letters?’ The lizard asked, finally.

 

‘Is that the spell they use?’ It wanted him to make me human, but I didn’t think he knew how. I plucked a seedling, and then realised it was spinach. I tossed it to the lizard, who ate it, neatly hiding the evidence that I failed even at weeding.

 

‘If it helps you to think of it that way,’ the lizard said. ‘Smooth out a patch of dirt.’ He picked up a stick in his mouth and started drawing in the dirt with it. Ba was explaining something to Riyamn, and neither of them was paying me any attention. I decided to take what I could get.


	6. Chapter 6

The trick to reading was obvious, once you knew it. You see a letter, you make a sound. Maybe I wasn’t completely stupid after all, I just hadn’t known the secret.

 

But simple wasn’t the same as easy. There were a lot of letters, and they took different shapes depending on where they were in the word and what letters were next to them, and sometimes the letters next to them made them make a different sound. The lizard left each day’s group of letters in the dirt for me, and I ran off and looked at them periodically through the next day. If I learned all my letters perfectly, the lizard would trade me a story at night.

 

Maghris came up behind me while I was crouched in the garden. I didn’t notice her until she leaned down and wiped out the letters in the dirt and she signed _why?_

 

‘Because I want to,’ I said quietly.

 

_Books and time to read them are not for us. If they know you are reading, they will think you do not know your place, and that makes you dangerous._

 

‘Ba knows,’ I said. ‘He saw me yesterday and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t tell me to go away.’

 

_Ba isn’t the whole family, Xhind, and he isn’t around all the time. This is a bad idea and it will cause trouble. No more of this._

 

That evening, after Maghris brought Ba his tea in the courtyard and Riyamn came downstairs with his tablets, Maghris took me and her mending up to the roof. I threaded needles for her and tried to look inconspicuous while the kids played and Anu Riyamn shook her head and picked stitches out of Amnah’s embroidery and gave it back to her to correct.

 

When Ba came home after noon the next day, I marched up to him and announced, ‘I know the letters.’

 

‘Really.’ Usually he would smile when I did something like that, but he didn’t smile now.

 

‘Yes, look.’ I recited the alphabet while drawing the letters in the air with my finger. He still didn’t smile. ‘Are you mad?’

 

‘You only know a few of the letters,’ Ba said tiredly. ‘I wish you wouldn’t sneak around either, Xhind. Xhalqis will come for you in the night if you keep being bad.’ I shuddered. He asked Maghris for a drink of water and then went upstairs to the big bedroom where Anu Riyamn and the girls were having their afternoon sleep.

 

Maghris continued taking me up to the roof in the evening to do the mending in the last of the daylight. Voices and laughter drifted down from the tops of neighbouring buildings where other families were also sitting out in the evening. Sometimes Anu Riyamn was tired and sometimes the kids were too noisy, but if not she told stories of bad children who were kidnapped and eaten by the hag Xhalqis and shepherds who caught wild goats whose milk never ran dry and farmers’ younger sons who discovered pure water in old cisterns and married many wives.

 

One evening, Maghris and I were on our way up the stairs and Riyamn was on his way down. He stopped. ‘Ba says Xhind should come with me,’ he said to Maghris. She shrugged and signed to me to behave myself, took the mending basket from me, and carried on up the stairs.

 

Ba was sitting on the bench under the grape arbour with his tea, as usual. Riyamn read off his tablet for a long while. Ba stopped him and corrected him periodically, but he was reading joined-up letters and I couldn’t really. I watched a beetle crawling over the bricks and wondered where the lizard had gotten to. I hadn’t seen him in a few days.

 

‘Now you, Xhind,’ Ba said.

 

‘Wh - yes?’ I’d nearly said _what_ to an adult, which was very rude.

 

‘Recite as much as you know.’ I did. ‘Tel comes before jel, and you forgot pela.’ I had gotten better, but I still sometimes forgot pela. ‘Riyamn, do you still have your alphabet tablet?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘You can teach Xhind the rest of the letters. She can read to you before you read to me, so come down early tomorrow, and review the end of the last chapter, alright.’

 

‘Yes, Ba.’

 

‘Listen to Riyamn, Xhind. He’s giving you his time and knowledge, so give him your ears and your attention.’

 

‘Yes, Ba,’ I said.

 

‘Good girl.’ I studied Riyamn’s tablet and tried not to smile. He finished his tea and rubbed his face. ‘I have to get back to work.’ He straightened up slowly, knees popping, and went through the door on the other side of the courtyard and into his shop.


	7. Vigil

‘What comes after jel?’ Riyamn asked. ‘Come on, you knew this yesterday.’ The alphabet tablet was right in front of me but I couldn’t make out the letters scratched into the thin wax. I had known most of them the day before, but it was a hot day and my throat felt like a sandy cave. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since before sunrise. My head was fuzzy and I wanted to lay down in the cool store-room and doze until evening, when Maghris would bring out pitchers of cold water and melons and cheese.

 

‘I know, I know, quit rushing me. Um…’ I wanted badly to impress him with how much I knew, but the letters had fled from my brain. ‘Shel.’ I paused again. He started to form the sound of the next letter and I spoke before he could finish. ‘No, gil! It’s gil. I do too know it.’

 

‘Okay, what’s next?’ I had no idea. ‘You can say it from the beginning. Sometimes that helps me.’

 

I blew out air. ‘This is stupid, why do you even want to do it?’

 

‘So I can be a shinin, I told you.’

 

‘Yes, but _why_. Do you even know what a shinin does?’

 

‘ _Yes_. Of course I do. He leads the prayers. I’ve been to the maslat.’

 

‘Tell me what it was like.’

 

‘Not now Xhind. Ba’s going to come soon and I’ll have to tell him that you don’t even know half the letters yet.’

 

‘I’ll do the letters if you promise to tell me why you want to be a shinin.’

 

‘My teacher would cane you if you did that in his class.’

 

‘They _cane_ kids? You didn’t say that before.’ Riyamn had said that the maslat had soft carpets, and suspended from the ceiling were iron hoops hung with glass lanterns like dewdrops. It was always clean even though nobody was ever seen cleaning it, it smelled of incense and perfume, and men sat in there reading scripture in beautiful voices. Hearing about it didn’t make up for not being allowed to go, but I liked to hear Riyamn talk about it. I was pretty sure Heaven would be just like it. Neither the maslat nor the heaven that existed in my mind contained canings. ‘Did _you_ get caned?’

 

‘Of course not! I behave. Now: alif, bel - ’

 

I picked up where he left off and we stumbled through the rest of the letters, but after pel I was really just repeating after him. Finally, I finished, and Riyamn read to me off his wooden plank like I had any idea what he was saying. I sure couldn’t have corrected him, if that’s what Ba was hoping for.  

 

Riyamn was on the second to last line when Ba came out onto the balcony in his shirt and yelled down at us, ‘Are you ready?’

 

‘Yes!’ I said. I was ready to do something else.

 

‘No we’re not!’ Riyamn hissed at me.

 

‘I won’t tell him you didn’t finish if you don’t tell him I forgot some of the letters,’ I whispered back.

 

‘I didn’t finish because you kept talking!’

 

‘Okay, no deal.’

 

‘I’m not going to lie!’ Ba was coming down the stairs.

 

‘Up to you.’

 

‘Xhind!’

 

‘So, how did it go? Did she learn all the letters, Riyamn?’

 

‘Uh,’ Riyamn said. ‘I think she knows them better than yesterday. I mean, I think she’s tired today. She’ll get them all tomorrow, God willing.’ He looked at me pointedly. It was a fast day, and he was very nearly lying. I’d better learn them all by tomorrow.

 

‘How was his reading, Xhind?’

 

‘Good. Very good.’

 

Ba settled on the bench under the grape arbour and looked around for his cup of tea before remembering it was a fast day. Riyamn read off his board like any other day.   I envied him a little for how easy fasting seemed to be for him. I was looking longingly at anything with leaves, tempted to chew it and suck the moisture out. I’d spent the early morning helping Maghris grind barley flour and grate dried lime peel. My eyes and mouth felt like they were lined with barley grit.

 

Even Ba seemed tired and distracted. When Riyamn asked him if a word was pronounced this way or another way, Ba had to have him repeat the sentence.

 

Anu Riyamn interrupted before Riyamn was done. She leaned over the balcony railing and yelled a question at Ibu Riyamn. Had he remembered to buy milk? How could he possibly forget?

 

‘I’ve been busy,’ he replied. She started to yell, ‘They’re your kin too – ‘ and he shouted over her, ‘I’ll do it, Nehleh, you don’t need to get so upset about every little thing. I’ll send Maghris now.’ He told us to review, then cautiously straightened his knee a few times before hobbling into the kitchen to wake Maghris from her afternoon nap. I’d heard her get up that morning and opened my eyes to find that it was still absolutely dark, except for the glow of the kitchen fire as she stirred it up and added kindling.   She patted me as she came back through the room and put a hand over my eyes to tell me to go back to sleep. Which I did, listening to her humming and working the grinding stone in the trough. I drifted off again and woke with a start at dawn when Anu Riyamn came down and barked at me to get up and help grind the grain so she could make the bread.

 

Riyamn leaned towards me and spoke softly, ‘You’re going to have to learn all of the letters by heart by tomorrow afternoon, or I will tell Ba that you didn’t do it and tried to get me to lie for you. I don’t care if he punishes me too, it’s vigil night, Xhind! You’re going to get both of us haunted.’

 

‘Fine, okay, I was going to do it anyways.’

 

‘You made a huge fuss about going to school, but you haven’t even learned the letters yet. It’s been weeks.’

 

‘I’ve been busy working while you’re sitting around all day!’ That argument seemed to work for Ba when Anu Riyamn nagged him.

 

‘Working while sitting and schoolwork and - and other kinds of work are _still work_ , Xhind.’ We’d both heard his mother say the same thing to his Ba.  Riyamn was starting to splutter angrily just like she did, so I knew I’d won.

 

‘Whatever, Riyamn. Stop talking, your breath stinks.’ It was a fast day. Everyone’s mouth smelled like an open grave.

 

‘I’ll tell Ba what you did!’

 

‘Shut it, both of you!’ Anu Riyamn yelled down from the balcony. Fasting didn’t reduce her volume much. ‘Riyamn, have a lay down before sunset, you’ve been sitting out in the sun too long.’

 

‘We’re not – ‘ he started to croak and cleared his throat. ‘Not done yet!’

 

‘Yes we are,’ I said.

 

‘You’re done for today! It’s hot, go inside before you make yourself sick!’

 

Riyamn reluctantly gathered up his tablet and went upstairs. I went to lie down in our room where it was cooler and passed Maghris leaving. _We’re going shopping_ , she signed. _Don’t eat or drink anything, Xhind._

 

The gate closed behind Maghris and Ba. I waited for a few minutes. All was quiet upstairs. I didn’t touch the pitchers of cool water, Maghris would know, but I very carefully shifted the stone lid of the big cooling jar enough to dip a coffee cup in. I drank just enough to wash the dust out of my mouth and moisten my throat, careful not to drip any water and leave tell-tale splotches on the pottery, then moved the lid back, dried the cup on my trousers, and put the cup back upside-down on the stack, exactly as it had been. I was pretty sure I had covered every possible way I could get caught. I lay on our mat under the roof of vines with a scarf keeping the hot splotches of sunlight off my face and got to work calling the silver lizard. If I was lucky, he might show up later that night. I was dead set on learning the letters now, even if it was boring, just to prove to Riyamn that I could.


	8. Stories in the Dark

The long afternoon finally ended. The family prayed on the rugs we’d laid out in the courtyard where it was coolest, and Maghris and I prayed behind them on our own rug – only the obligatory prayers. Maghris only prayed on special occasions. By the time the family had finished their prayers, we had everything ready. The palm mats were spread on the stones next to the garden, with a dish of vigil bread in the centre and a ring of clay cups around it, each with a curl of lime peel in the bottom, and the cold pitchers of water standing by. That was our supper. We all drank three cups of water, sprinkled a little on the garden, and then ate three pieces of bread, except Orrnah spat it out and her mother couldn’t convince her to try any more, but she was the youngest and Anu Riyamn let it go. The bread was more like crackers, thin and hard, made of barley meal and salt and grated lime rind and thyme. It was rather bitter.

 

And then Ba read scripture – he was the only one besides Riyamn who could – and Anu Riyamn said what she remembered of the dead. She had said the very same thing in each of the few vigil nights I could remember. Maghris and I were excused to clear up while Amnah and Riyamn also remembered the dead. Orrnah wasn’t old enough to remember, but she’d been coached and could say all of the memories nearly as well as I could. The first Umayn had been small and had thick, straight black hair, she would have been beautiful when she grew up if she put on weight, and she smiled at her mother once, and bit Amnah’s hand. Listret had been fat and brown with little hands and feet with pink nails and had crawled into a water jar once and sat silently until she fell asleep and everyone thought she’d escaped and fallen in a ditch. The memories were as much a spell as all of the other recitations were, calling the lost babies back into being as if it could revive them. I hardly remembered either of them. But it was the remembrance of their family that signified, not my remembrance.

 

We only had a few cups to wash and the leftover bread to wrap up, and then we sat in the kitchen and waited. Maghris turned away from the family and signed to me, _you are not a part of the vigil, but you are a part of this household. Did you see how I fast when they fast, and pray when they pray? You should do the same, out of respect, even if you don’t understand._

_Okay,_ I signed.

 

_There is a circle of wrinkles on your trousers. Just the size of a coffee cup. What do you have to say about that?_

 

_I was thirsty! I worked all day!_ I was signing rather large, the equivalent of yelling.

 

_So did I, so did Anu and Ba. You must practise fasting all day too. In a few years you will not be allowed to break your fast if you’re thirsty._

_I’m little, I’m allowed,_ I replied.

 

_Not so little. It’s disrespectful. Next time, no drinking or eating until it’s time. I will know, even if you think you’re clever. You’re not as clever as me._

I huffed. _I’m so clever!_

 

The remembering was done, apparently. Anu caught Maghris’ eye and nodded to her.

 

Maghris brought out a loaded tray, set it down, and backed away. Anu Riyamn placed a coffee cup in the centre of each of the two large, smooth flat stones laid in the garden. They marked where a child had been buried in a deep hole under each one, years ago, and then the holes filled in with sand and stones. There was a lit lamp on each one. Anu filled the cups with milk, set a slice of banana next to each one. She spoke to the babies to tell them that the food was for them, that their family here were few but their memories were strong and they would not neglect them, then set out larger bowls on the stones and filled them too. Everyone drank milk, which Maghris had bought that day, and ate banana off the gravestones. By the time that was done, Orrnah was crying because Anu wouldn’t let her grab the lamp wicks and Ba was rubbing his back and grumbling. He asked Anu if the ceremonies were done and she said she guessed that was good enough. He rubbed her back between her shoulder blades with the flat of his hand and rolled to his feet and hobbled through the door to his shop.

 

‘Wanna hear a story?’ Amnah said, after Anu had taken Orrnah inside. This was the best part of vigil night, when we all stayed up late telling scary stories, and Amnah was the best story teller.

 

‘Not one of your stories,’ Riyamn said. ‘Not now.’

 

‘There are no demons in this one! I wouldn’t, Riyamn!’

 

‘Good,’ he said. “It’ll scare the babies.” I looked to Maghris for permission and then crept closer and sat down on the stones a ways behind Riyamn. The lamps gave off small dim balls of light and mosquitoes were gathering.

 

“Long ago and far away, there lived three little girls and their brother. On vigil night they all lit candles and left milk for their dead baby siblings so that their siblings would not be angry and cry and haunt their dreams. Except one year, their servant who was a witch dug up the grave and stole some hair from one of the babies and used it to give them all bad dreams and keep their mother from having any more babies. So then the sisters went to the servant and told her they would tell their mother that she was the Old Hag Xhalqis if she didn’t stop. But it turned out she was Xhalqis, so she stole the youngest sister and ran off with her – “

 

“You said you wouldn’t tell a scary story!”

 

“I’m not! It’s not going to end scary! Just wait and see Riyamn.”

 

“You’d better not.”

 

“Okay, okay. So the sisters climbed over the wall and chased Xhalqis and her nusjan kid through the streets and jumped on her and took their baby sister away and they hit Xhalqis so hard that she turned into a pulp and it took her head a very long time to grow back. And their brother helped. And they killed her nusjan kid and buried it. And then they all lived happily ever after, the end.”

 

“That was kind of a scary story,” Riyamn said.

 

“It had a happy ending!” Amnah protested. And then she told another one.


	9. Back From the Dead

After the others went to bed, I stayed up until nearly dawn, pinching myself to stay awake, putting sticks on the embers to keep the last of the fire going and keep Xhalqis and her nusjan children from coming and skinning and eating me. While I was watching the fire, it occurred to me, why didn’t Ba or Anu Riyamn or Maghris kill and bury me, like in the stories, so that all would be right with the world again? That really kept me awake, on that night and many others. Ba and Maghris might not want to but Anu Riyamn didn’t like me, so why didn’t she bury me when I was a baby? Maybe I didn’t live with her then. I didn’t know.

 

Maghris let me nap after breakfast the next morning while everyone was upstairs, and then there was lunch to make with the result that, when afternoon came around, I had not memorised the rest of the letters.

 

“You didn’t do your homework, did you Xhind,” Riyamn said when I stumbled over the middle of the alphabet.

 

“I was working!” I said, although I was actually napping some of the time.

 

“I had school, but I still did mine this morning.”

 

“You should ask Ba to let me go to school with you, and then I can learn along with you and not have to try to do it and work at the same time. He’d do it, if you ask.” Riyamn was usually in Ba’s good books.

 

“There aren’t any girls at school, Xhind.”

 

“They must go some other time,” I said.

 

“I don’t think so,” he said.

 

“They’ll make an exception for me.”

 

“Ba already told you no, Xhind. It’s only for boys. But you can learn at home. It’s better that way.”

 

He was completely failing to convince me. “It’s stupider that way.” When it came down to it, I didn’t want to learn at home.

 

“Don’t be a baby.”

 

We bickered until Ba came down, and then neither of us had done our review and he was exasperated with both of us, so I guess I won that one. I got Riyamn in a little bit of trouble.

 

* * *

 

 

_Maghris, is it true that only boys can go to school?_ I signed one morning when Riyamn was at school.

 

_I don’t know if that’s true now. But in the past, sometimes the smaller maslats only had school for boys and girls had to learn at home, as much as their parents think they need to know. Wealthy girls could have tutors and sometimes the parents in a neighbourhood put them all together. It’s cheaper to share tutors. Sometimes they did that for boys too, if they weren’t getting a good enough education at the smaller maslats but they couldn’t afford the university preparation school._

_I can’t have a tutor, can I?_

_I think Riyamn is your tutor. Joking._ But she winked to let me know that maybe she wasn’t really joking. And that made me feel a little better. I could think of Riyamn as my tutor.

 

_He’s not a very good one._

 

_It didn’t used to be this way_ , Maghris signed. _In the old days, everyone went to the same schools, but some of these humans want to keep boys and girls separate so they don’t get ideas, and the separateness has spread. It’s spread to humans and nusjan too._

 

I didn’t really know what she meant, because I was nusjan and living with humans. But I thought about it for a while, and about how maybe I wasn’t allowed to go to school because I was nusjan. I wasn’t considered as good as a human, and it made me clench my teeth and stomp everywhere, as long as Anu Riyamn wasn’t in earshot.

 

* * *

 

 

Anu Riyamn was always talking about Bardak: about how barley was cooked there – unlike everyone else, they had preserved the original and most nutritious way of cooking barley, which involved rinsing it thrice and covering it with water and letting it sit for a day and night before drinking the water and cooking the grain with salt and ground lime peel and a bone – and how women dressed around the house and out of it and on which occasions and in whose presence they wore kohl and how they sat – with their legs folded under them, not cross-legged like harlots or with one foot pointing towards the food like these city people – and the correct way to do laundry and so on. But Yzid never spoke of it. So I asked him, one day when I was eight or so, where he was from, at the end of a lesson where Riyamn rattled off the verses he’d memorised and I didn’t even participate. He had long surpassed me and I mostly just went to the afternoon lessons to spend time with Ba. Ba seemed to know that and didn’t call on me any more.

 

‘From Bardak, of course,’ he said.

 

‘With Anu Riyamn?’ I asked.

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘How come she talks about it all the time, but you never do?’

 

‘It’s her home,’ he said. ‘She lived there all her life, but I left a long time ago.’

 

‘Don’t you remember it? You’re from there too, why isn’t it your home?’ I asked.

 

‘Because I left, Xhind, and I stayed away for many years.’

 

‘Where did you go?’

 

‘I went to sea, when I was about thirteen.’ He tapped tobacco into his pipe and sent me to bring a lit twig from the kitchen fire. I refrained from pestering him while he puffed at it and then sat quietly for a moment. He often lit his pipe when he was gearing up to tell a story.

 

‘Before I left,’ he continued, ‘There were several dry years in a row in Bardak and not enough for everyone to eat. The babies and frailer old people were dying. The village had to keep a certain number of women alive to survive, but they didn’t need extra teenage boys. So many of the sheep had died that they didn’t need all of us to herd them anymore, and it wasn’t likely we’d be able to marry any time soon. They hadn’t been feeding us older boys as much for a while, and then the village held a council that we weren’t allowed into.

 

‘My mother gave me a chunk of barley bread and a gourd of water the next morning and told me that I had to leave. The village had decided that we weren’t needed and they couldn’t feed us anymore. So they gave our remaining sheep back to our families and held a funeral for us. The women men cut their arms and rubbed ash in, adding one more mark to the lines of the dead on their arms for each son they lost, the men wailed, the children wandered around in confusion. They built a stone cairn for each one of us like they build over graves, except our graves were just the bare earth of the hillside, and they made us walk ahead of the villagers down the path that led out of the village and into the mountains. We had heard that if we walked west long enough we would reach the sea, and we were told that we could return in seven years, if we brought with us five sheep or their equivalent, and they would destroy our cairns and the headman would declare us alive again.

 

‘Some of the boys went north to other valleys where there might be rain, but my two cousins and I went west and we did find the ocean. We walked south along the coast until we found a ship which took us aboard after taking on fresh water.’

 

‘What about the other boys? Did they ever come back?’ I asked.

 

‘Not that I ever heard of.’

 

‘Do you think they found those valleys?’

 

‘I don’t know, Xhind. If they had joined another village and started new lives, they probably would have at least gone back to Bardak at some point, so that their mothers would know they lived.’

 

‘But you went back?’

 

‘Yes, ten or twelve years later.’

 

‘And they decided that you could be alive again?’

 

‘Not really. After much discussion, which I wasn’t allowed to take part in – they wouldn’t even let me down into the valley, I had to wait on the other side of the pass for a week, sleeping on stone and eating dried fish while they decided what to do. I nearly turned around and went back to the coast, but they were my family. But eventually they read enough verses at me and hit me with enough xhind twigs that they decided I was alive and not a jan and hadn’t been resurrected by a sorcerer, and they took my cairn apart and let me back in.’

 

Ba didn’t sound like anyone had been happy about it, so I asked, ‘what did they do then? Did they let you stay?’

 

‘I had thought that when they held our funerals they had only been declaring us no longer part of the village, so that they didn’t have to feed us. But in their hearts, we really had died, and they had accepted that we were gone. So when I came back, it was like I was a walking corpse to them. They boy who had left Bardak ten years before was gone. I wasn’t him anymore. So in a way they were right, they had held my funeral and I was dead and there was no bringing me back and I shouldn’t have tried to come back. I hadn’t realised that the reason I’d never heard of the seven-year-death was that nobody ever came back from it, because they started new lives, and they didn’t leave them. My cousin had warned me that it would never work, I couldn’t go back to Bardak with my five sheep and marry and farm like I’d dreamed of all those years. So I left the sheep with my mother and I went back to the sea. It wasn’t worth trying to get the sheep back through the mountain trails - I’d already lost two on the trip there, foreign sheep can’t handle rocks like Bardak sheep can.’

 

At eight years old, I was a little young for the story. Ba was big and solid and his voice was warm and strong. I could hear his heart thumping inside his chest when I leaned against his side. But his whole village didn’t believe that he was alive and really Yzid, and they knew him best. Maybe they were right and he was dead and still walking around. Maybe he wasn’t at all what I thought he was.

 

The thought kept me awake at night for months, and it still gives me chills when I think about it.


	10. Chapter 10

We were sitting in the courtyard under the canopy of the bitter lime tree on the day Anu Riyamn struck Amnah.

 

‘Maghris, what’s that in the child’s hair?’ Anu Riyamn asked.

 

Maghris looked at me building little towers of rocks in the garden with Riyamn and then looked back at Anu Riyamn. She slowly raised her forefingers up to her temples and crooked them like horns.

 

‘God protect us from evil,’ Anu Riyamn said. ‘They’re growing.’ I could feel her staring at me and making the sign against evil. Everyone else also made the sign, including Riyamn. My face burned.

 

Maghris nodded, pinched her thumbs against her index fingers, and crossed each of her hands over the other alternately in a braiding motion.

 

‘No,’ Anu Riyamn said, ‘even her hair isn’t thick enough, it’s not working anymore. Make a charmal for her out of that old shirt I gave you.’

 

‘I don’t want to wear the stupid charmal,’ I said to Maghris when she reminded me that I’d ‘forgotten’ my charmal somewhere for about the fifth time that morning. ‘It’s scratchy and it won’t stay on.’

 

_Here, do it like this._ She showed me on hers and then had me imitate her. It came untucked about a minute later and dragged in the ashes. _Do it tighter this time. Amnah can do it, why can’t you?_

‘I want a hat like Riyamn’s,’ I said.

 

_I know, but this is what you have, now make sure it stays on your head or so help me I will sew it on._

 

Anu Riyamn finished weaving herself a new charmal and gave Maghris her faded old blue one to cut down for me, so I’d have to wear it and quit walking around bare-headed and disgracing her.

 

‘Why are _you_ wearing _that_?’ Amnah asked, when she saw me wearing it.

 

‘Maghris told me to.’

 

‘Well I’m older and Ma said I could have it, so give it.’

 

I shrugged and took it off, and she traded me her russet-brown charmal. It didn’t make any difference to me. I didn't want to wear the thing in the first place.

 

‘Is it pretty, do you think?’ She asked.

 

‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. It was once the blue of heaven but was now faded to nearly white with just a touch of blue, like the sky in the morning. It was soft and frayed and had little burn holes from sparks but it suited her light skin better than it probably suited mine. Amnah skipped away with a smile on her face. I threw the end of her brown charmal over my shoulder and went back to weeding.

 

Amnah didn’t get very far before Anu Riyamn noticed. ‘Why are you wearing that old thing? You have a good new charmal I just made for you, what did you do with it?’ Amnah said I’d given it to her and that it should be hers, she had been promised it and I was only a servant and younger and probably a slave’s bastard –

 

‘ _What_ was that word you just said to me?’ I could have warned Amnah to stop, but she never had much caution.

 

‘Bastard – ‘

 

Anu Riyamn slapped her across the face. ‘That is a horrible disgusting word and you’d better not ever say it again, _ever_ –‘

 

Amnah sat holding her bleeding lip and trying not to cry while Anu Riyamn shouted at her, until Ba came out of his shop and got Maghris to take Amnah to the kitchen and wash the blood off her face.

 

I was still standing dumbfounded next to the laundry tub when he took Anu Riyamn’s arm and spoke quietly to her and she burst into tears. ‘Well you’ve only yourself to blame! You should have let me deal with this when she was born.’

 

‘She’s standing right there and she can hear you,’ he steered her towards the stairs and waved at me to go away, but I was frozen in place. I’d never seen Anu Riyamn angry enough to hit someone, not just slap their hands but actually draw blood, and I’d never seen her cry, and I had no idea why either of them was happening. She took two steps towards me and I was doomed, but I couldn’t seem to move.  

 

‘I don’t care if she can hear me, she might as well know what she is. There’s no sense trying to keep secret what never _was_ secret.’ Anu Riyamn snatched Amnah’s charmal off my head and stormed on by.

 

‘I don’t want to make her feel bad for something that isn’t her fault.’ Ba’s voice was sharp. He grabbed Anu Riyamn’s arm as she passed him but she pushed his hand off and stomped up the stairs.

 

‘This mess isn’t _all_ my fault.’

 

‘Nehleh! Come back here, I’m talking to you.’

 

‘ – how many years will I have to suffer? How many will it take to satisfy you?’ She shouted over her shoulder.

 

Ba began to climb the stairs, pulling his bad leg up after him. ‘That’s not why, I told you you’re misunder-‘

 

‘Being trapped here and worried all the time isn’t mercy, Yzid. You should’ve let me do my penance and be done with it. Better to burn the sickness out even if it hurts.’

 

They carried on arguing up the stairs and onto the roof.

 

When they had gone, I asked Maghris what a bastard was. _A child whose father was no good,_ she explained. _But we do not blame the child._

 

I still didn’t understand.

 

I had always thought Ba was my father like he was everyone else’s, but he wasn’t ‘no good,’ so that couldn’t be right, could it? I thought about it for a while, and then asked Maghris who my father was.

 

_I don’t know, love_.

 

‘Who is my mother?’

 

_I can’t say_.

 

‘Are you my mother?’ She said no, as always. ‘Are you anyone’s mother?’

 

_Yes,_ she signed, which confirmed my belief that all adults had children.

 

‘Where are they?’ I asked.

 

_They are slaves,_ she said.

 

‘But where are they?’

 

_I don’t know. Not here._

 

‘Why not?’

 

_Because slaves go where they’re taken._

 

‘Why?’

 

_Enough why. I am not your mother, but you can still be my child._ She picked me up and rocked me like a baby, although I was much too big for it. Orrnah saw, toddled over, clambered up me, and sat on my stomach. Maghris kissed the top of her head and then pushed us both off.

 

I decided that she was my mother and Ba was my father, but I came out nusjan, so they had to pretend they weren’t my parents, and I had to be a servant. They still loved me, but they would have loved me more if I was human.

 

Anu Riyamn shoved the blue charmal at me a few days later, now dyed a weird greenish-brown. I wanted to wear it even less then, but I took it and put it on my head and wrapped the end around and tucked it in. It came down nearly to my knees. She was either silent or snappish with me for some days, but then she forgave me for whatever it was. For causing trouble; for being the object of Amnah’s jealousy; for being small and dark and nusjan; for attracting evil; for existing. All of those things were wrapped up tight and tucked inside the word ‘bastard.’

 

Amnah took any opportunity she could from then on to mutter insults or slap me or take food from me. Maghris shooed her away when she could, but she wasn’t always around.


	11. Jan

If you stood inside the front gate facing the garden, the kitchen was on the right and Ba’s shop was on the left. The bedrooms and sitting room were built along the back, raised up high enough to walk under. There was storage underneath. On top of Ba’s shop there was a little palm house built, just a roof and two walls to block the view from the street. We weren’t allowed up there because there was no wall around the edge of the roof of the shop, and because we had the house rest of the house to tear around in, Anu Riyamn said. She and Ba would sit in the house late at night after everyone else was asleep, on the nights when Ba was with us.

 

I can see them there now, sitting under the orange globe lantern, drinking sweet sage tea, and eating roasted almonds with the incense smoke and their voices drifting up to the roof. I think they thought nobody – especially the neighbours - could see or overhear them from there. I was lying on my mat on the warm baked mud of the roof with Maghris and the kids snoring softly a little ways away and the neighbours’ laughter coming from neighbouring roofs, but I could hear Anu and Ibu Riyamn fine tonight. They weren’t happy.

 

Anu Riyamn was saying, ‘so it’s fine by you if I’m scared every day of my life and our children are in danger, but you won’t let anyone hurt the feelings of the demon’s whelp or make her feel unwelcome. God save your parents –‘

 

‘You don’t need to be scared, it’s perfectly safe. I worked with them for years – ‘

 

‘And ended up with nothing to show for your whole life’s work but a mangled body and a pile of firewood. It’s not normal, even I know that. You don’t just see people with crushed skulls and missing limbs walking around. All that work and all that struggle and you ended up in rags again, dragging your broken carcass back to the village to die for real. You may not remember what you looked like, but I do. It’s no wonder they thought you were a jan.’

 

‘But I healed and found a new trade – No, we’ll talk about that later. Stop arguing and listen to me, Nehleh. The whole rest of the world – I’ve seen enough of it and you haven’t, let me finish – the whole world outside our village lives with nusjan, and they do fine. Nusjan are no more cursed than you or I are – okay, bad example, they don’t bring harm just by being near, only God deals out harm.’

 

‘God deals out harm if you consort with jan. You had it coming.’

 

‘Really, Nehleh?’ She was silent. ‘And you? Did I do wrong to forgive you, even when your own family wouldn’t? Would you have rather starved in the mountains for someone else’s crime?’

 

‘Putting your whole family in danger because of some weak principle you heard from idolaters and refuse to drop - ’

 

‘Do you still think the doctor is an idolater? Really? After all he’s done for you? Nehleh, I have told you, to be merciful is our religion, it’s not idolatry. Your grandmothers have been up in the mountains for centuries and I doubt any of our line have ever been able to read, they didn’t have all the information and they sure weren’t scholars. I don’t know what else to say to you – ‘

 

‘That’s not even the point. I can’t know what he believes but I don’t like the looks of him and I don’t like how he looks at my son.’

 

‘He’s a good man and a believer and my friend. He would never harm either of you, he’s a doctor, for God's sake, not a mountain witch dressed in rat skins and children’s teeth. You’d know that if you ever learned the language.’

 

‘Honestly, Yzid, you never gave me the chance to – ‘

 

‘You had plenty of chances!’

 

‘I had a few months! I’ve never been away from my village in my life, of course I can’t speak all the languages of the jan.’

 

‘He’s not a jan!’

 

‘I didn’t say that he was! I just…this isn’t good for anybody, Yzid. You’ve made your point, and leaving the barley in the field doesn’t make it riper. It just makes it rot.’

 

‘Fine. I have to get going.’

 

After Ba left, Anu Riyamn put out the light and prayed for a long time. I could hear her voice rising and falling in that thick Bardaket accent. The prayers were in Bilarni and for all Ba understood them and she didn’t, she believed in them with an unshakeable certainty that neither he nor I had. And for all she was wrong about nusjan, in some ways she was wiser than he was. He should have listened to her about me.

They had been arguing about nusjan, and also jan, and the way Anu Riyamn talked it sounded like she thought they were almost the same things. I was nusjan, so was I a jan too? I was pretty darn sure I didn’t fly around at night locking up princesses in barrels or leading poor men to caves of cursed gold. Anu Riyamn had said before that she thought the doctor was a jan, but that made no sense. He made people better. So why did she think that?

 

I asked Maghris if nusjan could also be jan.

 

_Listen, Xhind_ , she said. _Long ago, before the Bilarnis came from the sea, everyone here was nusjan. The Bilarnis tell each other that nusjan are evil so they can feel like what they do is right, but they’re wrong._

_I don’t understand_ , I signed _. I didn’t ask that._

 

_What I mean, nusjan and jan are completely different creatures. Jan come from dark places, but they are not evil like the respected lady thinks. No creature is. You are not a jan, but you can choose to do good or bad. Demons also choose, and some of them are believer and some are not._

_Okay,_ I signed. _But I don’t understand about the Bilarnis. What do they do?_

_I will tell you when you’re older._

_Maghris Maghris Maghris_. I tugged on her sleeve.

_It’s a long story. You will understand when you’re twelve, ask me then._

 

Luckily for Maghris, I forgot before the year was out. But she didn’t forget.


	12. Underground

Riyamn read faster and faster and the texts got harder and harder until, within a year, I could no longer keep up. I could no longer even read his books; I hardly understood any of the words. I didn’t have enough Bilarni to keep up with the basics of religious law and nobody had the time - or probably the desire - to teach me. Riyamn spent all day at school learning this stuff, after all; teaching me would not have been a small undertaking. And so Riyamn went to a neighbour’s house in the late afternoons to study, and I was left behind again, with Maghris and the laundry. But Yzid had another idea for how I could be useful.

 

He came out of his shop one day through the side door into the courtyard, clicking his prayer beads as he walked, which he did when he was thinking.

 

He had a unique set of wooden prayer beads that gleamed a deep red-brown, which he had carved on sea voyages long ago, and polished smooth with movements of his thumb and first finger, till the faces were nearly gone. He was never without them. Nobody else’s prayer beads had faces carved on them, although sometimes they had words on them in Bilarni. I don't know what prayers he said, but I don't think they were always the same ones Anu Riyamn and the rest of us said.

 

“How do you feel,” he said to me, “about the dark.”

 

“Um, fine.” I’d never understood why Riyamn and even Amnah were so afraid of things lurking in the dark. It didn’t even seem particularly black to me, just grey, and I could tell perfectly well that there was nothing there. Except when there were lizards or cockroaches, but I didn’t mind those.

 

“Small spaces?” He asked.

 

“Okay.” I’d been shut up in jugs a lot by Amnah as a small child and was actually nervous about them, but I wasn’t going to tell Yzid that for fear he’d shut me up in a jug to rid me of it. He had a habit of trying to make Amnah face her fear of cockroaches, which only ended in screaming and tears.

 

“Excellent. Come see me after everyone goes to bed. Maghris, let her have a nap after dinner, if you can, but make sure to wake her up.”

 

* * *

 

Yzid unlocked the door from the courtyard into his shop and I followed him in and stood holding the lamp while he moved a table and rolled up the rug that was under it. His shop was packed with furniture in various stages of repair. Chairs with legs broken off, sofas that needed re-upholstering, worn rugs, wardrobes with scuffed corners and missing hinges. It smelled of incense, and fresh pipe tobacco, and old smoke, and wood shavings.

 

Yzid pulled up a trap door and gestured to me to lead the way, down into the dark.

 

But it wasn’t entirely dark, once we got there. We went down small stone steps into a passage with rows of parallel angled grooves carved into the walls. I had the lamp, and there were tiny golden lights in the distance. The tunnel was taller and wider than Yzid at that point, although it was getting smaller. I was getting nervous.

 

“Where are we going?” I ventured.

 

“Just along the tunnel. To do some business. Quiet now, there’s a house above us,” he replied, not ungently. We walked in silence for a while. Some of the walls were made of square cut stone, or brick with pillars, or stacked pieces of thin dry dusty stone in irregular shapes. There was writing carved into the walls sometimes. I couldn’t read any of it; it definitely wasn’t Bilarni. There were faint voices coming from somewhere up ahead.

 

“Nusjan are perfect for this sort of work,” Yzid said. “Small and strong and not afraid of the dark. It’s a good thing I have you.” I swelled with pride. “You’re going to be carrying some goods,” he said. “Just keep to the tunnels with the lights and follow the other children. Don’t hang back or wander off, we might never find you down here.” We took a sharp turn and the source of the voices appeared in a large hollowed-out room. Young men and children, some of them girls. I glimpsed forked antlers on the head of a child about my age, of indeterminate gender. I caught their eye and smiled. They stared at me, and I felt suddenly self-conscious. I was the only person there wearing a dress and charmal, and I didn’t understand a thing anyone but Yzid was saying.

 

“Shhhh you all,” he said, and then said something in another language. They quieted down, with a few titters in the back. People craned to see me. I stared back. “Xhind,” Yzid said to me, “follow Lnunz and Ilred here.   I can’t go any farther. Take a load from where they show you and carry it to where they show you and then do it again until it’s all moved. It’s dead easy. I’ll come back for you later tonight.” He waved at the crowd and gave them a few instructions and then took the lamp from me and turned and walked back up the tunnel, leaving me alone with all those strangers. I had never seen so many people in my life before, much less new people. I stood there with a lump in my throat and had no idea which ones Lnunz and Ilred were. But they knew who I was. The child with antlers came forward and took my arm and we all set off across the room and down into another passage, which very quickly grew so low I had to crouch down, and then scramble, on my belly at times. I could hardly breathe until we came out into another room.

 

The kids crowded around and grabbed packages off a pile. The child with antlers shoved into the crowd and came out loaded down with packages. She gave two to me, and kept two for herself. They were heavy for her size. She said something with the word “Lnunz” in it, kind of like how Ba had said it.

 

“Xhind,” I replied. She looked at me. I repeated it.

“Kind?”

 

That was not my name, but she probably couldn’t get any closer. “What’s in here?” I asked, and hefted the package. It rattled slightly. She said something in another language, I assumed Bilarni because I recognised a few words, and we were off talking, although neither of us understood the other.

 

We walked and crawled down tunnels and over boulders and around corners. Some of them were so narrow they nearly made me panic, down there under the weight of tonnes of stone and the city. Some of the children had tied their packages to their chests, but most of them just carried them and pulled them after them through tight spots. There was one I didn’t think I could get through. It was a horizontal crevice where it looked like the ceiling had fallen in, leaving a space about a foot and a half tall between the fallen slabs of rock and the tunnel floor.

 

I stopped, and couldn’t breathe, and nearly cried, but I couldn’t in front of all those people, who were starting to grumble at my slowness. Someone pushed past me and went through the crevice.   Lnunz took my elbow and walked me forward and then went through next, crawling on her stomach like a snake with her packages clamped between her legs. Someone shoved me from behind and I fell forward and saw a hand reaching back through the crevice for me and Lnunz yelling “Kind!” The tight space wasn’t very long, then. I had been shut up in olive jars for hours, I could do this too. I had to. I had little choice but to hike my dress up and hold my packages between my legs like everyone else did. I grasped the hand and wiggled through, and came out on the other side hyperventilating and thoroughly filthy. A couple kids cheered and clapped. I turned red and let go of Lnunz’s hand and picked up my packages.

 

A while later, there was writing on the walls again. I read a few names and dates scratched in Bilarni. “What is written there?” I asked a boy, being buoyed up by Lnunz’s kindness and forgetting that nobody had any idea what I was saying. I asked again in my stilted formal Bilarni, learned from Riyamn’s schoolbooks.

 

He looked at me scornfully and asked, “Canst thee not read, milady?” In a high, mocking voice. Somebody snickered. I decided right then that I hated Bilarni and anyone who spoke it and would never speak it again. I would learn to talk like they talked. Whatever they were speaking, I guessed it wasn’t Bilarni after all, since the boy was the only person I’d understood.

 

We dropped the packages at the bottoms of various different sets of stairs, leading up to houses I supposed. Any of them could have been our house, I had no idea. I went to set my packages down at one set of stairs, being tired of carrying them, and Lnunz shook her head and motioned for me to pick them back up. Some of the kids had turned around and gone back, but we two kept going.

 

We came to a wider tunnel with squared-off stone walls and torches at closer intervals than the few lamps had been. There were open doorways in the walls, and through them were visible shelves and tables full of fabrics and shiny brass hinges and cheese and amber rosaries and all manner of things. There were people sitting on mats in the tunnel with herbs and pipes and packets of pins spread around them. Lnunz led the way to a doorway, dropped her packages off and motioned to me to put mine down too. She said a few words to the shopkeeper, and then took me hand and we ran down the tunnel, dodging shoppers. This must be a market, I thought. I had never seen one before.

 

We ran to the end of the tunnel and then around a corner into another where there were tables loaded with green peppers and pumpkins and tomatoes and strings of garlic and smoked chilis handing from the walls. Next to one stall was a basket of squishy and broken vegetables. Lnunz fished around and pulled out a squishy red fruit and a smashed green mango with a bad spot on the end. She held both out to me. I took the red one and bit into it. It had lots of small wet seeds and pulpy flesh and it was savoury and a little sweet. "Tomato," Lnunz said. "That's a tomato." She held up her fruit: "Mango."

 

"I know what a mango is," I said in Bardaket. "But I've never had a tomato before. I don't think they're Bardaket food. Or maybe Anu Riyamn just doesn't like them." I licked the juice off my dirty fingers. We walked back, peering into shops and dawdling. Riyamn was going to be so jealous when I told him about this.

 

We made two more trips to two different sets of stairs and by the time we were done, I was exhausted and bleary-eyed and dusty and very glad to see Yzid waiting for me in that first room he’d brought me to what seemed like a very long time ago.


	13. The Maw

Maghris grumbled at my filthy, ragged dress. I'd ripped the hem right off and torn the skirt partway up one seam, crawling on my belly with packages between my legs. _Are you alright, Xhind?_ Maghris asked. She seemed alarmed.

 

_Yes I'm fine._

 

_What were you doing last night, crawling all through town on your stomach?_

_Ba had me carrying packages underground._

_Is that all?_

_Yes. Why all the questions?_ I asked.

_There used to be a copper mine under what is now Telmaket, and later a quarry. The foundations of the buildings are built of stone dug up from beneath them, it's dangerous down there. Be careful, Xhind. Nobody should be down there._

_I don't think we're supposed to be down there. Ba shushed us whenever we talked,_ I said. _But the kids talked when he wasn't around._

 

_The tunnels go under what are now some of the nicer parts of town._ Maghris chuckled, dry and bitter. _When I was first a slave, I worked in the quarry, cutting the stone that the Bilarnis built their city out of. But then we revolted, and so they split us up. No more than one to a household and none to gather in the markets, on pain of death. I shouldn't be telling you this._

_I want to hear. I'm not scared._

_I am_ , Maghris said. _I'll tell you when you're a little older. When you're twelve and know what not to say to whom._

I begged, but she wouldn't tell me any more. _What are we going to do for clothes for you?_ Maghris asked. _You can't keep ruining clothes like this._

 

I saw my chance. _You should let me wear pants,_ I said. _Everyone else wears them._

_I don't think Anu Riyamn will like you wearing boys' clothes._

_The girls were wearing them too. It's not really boys' clothes if it's what everyone is wearing. Please, Maghris. I can't do this work in a dress, nobody does. Did you wear a dress in the quarry?_

_No, but you're not cutting stone. You probably could carry packages in a dress if you were more careful._

 

I told her about the crevice we had to crawl through.

 

_Oh my exploding tree_ , Maghris said, exaggerating my name until she changed the meaning, as she did when she felt something strongly. _I know you're afraid of being trapped. You were brave last night._

 

_I know._ I had never felt less brave, but I had gone underground and come back up.

 

Maghris found me an old pair of trousers of Riyamn's to wear, and sat sewing patches over the knees and making me a tunic out of a sack. I tried them on, and I glowed. I had finally gotten what I wanted: to wear boys' clothes at least some of the time, even if I couldn't wear a hat like Riyamn's. I tried, but I couldn't prevail upon Maghris to let me have a hat to wear underground. It would just fall off and get dirty. I had to go back to wearing a headband, but she let me tie an old black scarf horizontally across my head instead of under my chin like I'd used to.

 

_There,_ she said. _That's what we wore in the mines, to keep the sweat and dust out of our eyes. You look like a real worker now_. She looked a little sad.

 

_Do I look like you when you were a slave_?

 

_You are already nearly as tall as me, but you look like my son._ Maghris' eyes were bright with tears. I'd never seen her cry and I had no idea what to do, but she carried on briskly. _That's enough, take it off now. Put it in the trunk until you need it again, and don't let Anu Riyamn catch you wearing it. It's only for working underground, understand._ The tears were gone and she was back to normal, ordering me back to the laundry tub. It was already nearly noon, I'd slept in, and Anu Riyamn hadn't said a thing about it.

 

 

* * *

 

I'd slept late, and so I lay awake late into the night, listening to Maghris snoring and calling the silver lizard. The moon set over the house wall and I was still struggling to keep my eyes open, hoping that the lizard could come so I could tell him where I'd been. I wondered if it was one of the places he haunted. It seemed like the sort of dark, secret place where he might be found. But he never came, and I must have dozed off without realising it.

 

I was running down the tunnels, panting, holding a flickering lamp with hot oil splashing over my hand. But I didn't care, because on the back of my neck I could feel the hot breath of the Old Hag. Without looking back, I could see her long yellow incisors gleaming in the dark.

 

I careened around a corner, slopping the last of the oil out of the lamp, and the tunnel went completely dark. I went down on my belly and scrabbled around in the dark looking for the crevice I'd gone through earlier, but I couldn't find it. I kicked the Old Hag in the face, and threw the pieces of the broken lamp at her. She hissed, and told me she was coming to crack open my bones and suck out the marrow.

 

My foot hit against air, and I knew I'd found the crevice. I turned around and began crawling through it, but the Old Hag had ahold of my ankle and was pulling me back. I hauled myself forward under the low slab of rock, and suddenly it had turned into a maw and was eating me, chewing me with great stone teeth. The Hag bit off my foot and crunched it. I screamed and screamed but couldn't make any noise because I couldn't breathe.

 

I awoke with a gasp and sucked in air. Maghris was shaking me, but it hadn't woken me up. She wrapped me in her arms, there on our pallet beneath the grape vines and the stars, and I sobbed into her chest.

 

* * *

 

The next time Ba called me into the shop, Maghris said to me before I left, _It's okay to be scared. I'm scared too. Say a prayer and put your heart in the hands of the gods and walk up to the thing you are afraid of and look it in the eye. Stare it down. Be brave. It will get easier._ And then she pushed me towards Ba and I walked as though to my death. I got through it, because of Lnunz and not because of God or Maghris' gods, whomever they were. When I came back aboveground alive and intact, if Maghris said, _I'm proud of you_ , and kissed my dirty forehead.

 

But it never got any easier. I faced my fears twice a week, and each time I said a prayer and went down the stairs into the tunnel as if I was walking to my death.


	14. Alchemy Practise

“You’re looking a little more golden today,” the lizard said. I was in the process of pulling my tunic over my head and I startled and heard it tear. “How’s the alchemy practice going?”

 

“Goddamnit!” I pulled the tunic back off and inspected it. It was only an old sack and not all that strong. I went to get a threaded needle from Maghris’ sewing kit. “I’m going to be late!”

 

“You swear like a dock worker, and you’re wearing trousers. I’d say you’re halfway to being a boy already. A ship’s boy. Not really a step up in the world, but it’s a start.” The lizard talked while I hastily fixed the seam of my tunic.

 

“What’s alchemy?”

 

“The science of transforming one substance into another. Lead into gold and so forth.”

 

“Lead turning into gold, fish turning into birds. Nothing just stays as it is with you,” I said, and bit off the thread.

 

“Yes, that’s probably accurate. Transformations are what we’re about.” The lizard scurried down the wall to sit on my knee while I sewed.

 

“So why didn’t you think I could turn into a boy?”

 

“Because fish don’t really turn into birds. They naturally have wings, they don’t become something different. And only some creatures have the ability to transform their bodies. You’re not a jan, so you can’t change your shape,” the lizard explained. “That must be hard, if it feels like the wrong shape to you.”

 

I mulled that over. “So you _can_ turn into other things,” I said.

 

“That would be telling.”

 

“What can you turn into? A black dog? A witch?”

 

“Dinner,” the lizard suggested. “Your mother nearly turned me into dinner last time I came to see you. Has excellent aim with a stick, that woman.”

 

“Who?” I asked. “If you know who my mother is, then tell me.”

 

“Anu Riyamn. Isn’t she your mother?”

 

“I don’t think so. Why did you say she was?”

 

“Oh, I just guessed she was. A little lizard may have told me something he overheard. I was hoping you knew whether it was true.”

 

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Maghris would have told me if it was. And she would act like my mother. She acts more like the Old Hag.” Anu Riyamn was the most frightening thing in my life, after the cannibal from her stories.

 

“Well no, she might not. Giving birth doesn’t automatically mean a person’s kind or loving or wants to be a mother. Some people are just overwhelmed or unprepared. We lizards would know, we leave our eggs to hatch alone and to fend for themselves. But we’re not much for other lizards.”

 

“Well I think people had damned well better be prepared by the time they’re grown up. They’ve had long enough to get ready.”

 

The lizard laughed. “Be careful what you say, it could happen to you in a few years.”

 

That was a frightening thought. “No! I’m never getting married or having babies.”

 

“No?”

 

“No. They’re little beasts that scream and poop all the time. I wish they’d go back where they came from until they’re four years old, and then they can come out.”

 

“You’d make a fine lizard with that attitude. You’ve got my vote if you ever decide to join.”

 

“Can I?”

 

“Keep working on that alchemy practice.”

 

I pulled my tunic back over my head. “Is there a prayer for tight spaces?” I asked quietly.

 

The lizard thought for a moment, and then said in Bilarni. “Lord enlarge this space, Lord free my race, Lord brighten my face, Lord let me leave this place.”

 

“Thank you.” I repeated it a few times. “Did you just make that up?”

 

“No. Maybe. Does it matter?”

 

“The Bilarnis weren’t ever slaves, were they? Why did you say it in Bilarni?”

 

“Some of them have been slaves at times. They didn’t always rule the world. But you can say it in Bardaket if you like, it will work just as well. It’s just custom to say prayers in Bilarni, but it doesn’t really make sense to insist on it if you don’t understand the language. It’s no more powerful than any other language.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes. God understands Bardaket, little lizard.”

 

I said I had always thought of Him as like Ba, big and bearded and old, except Bilarni-speaking.

 

The lizard laughed. “Your God is a beached ship’s captain in yellow balloon pants? That’s a good one, I think I’ll keep it. Speaking of him, I can hear him coming. Goodbye now.” The lizard disappeared into a crack in the wall, and Ba yelled for me. I tied my scarf around my head and went back down underground.

 

 

* * *

 

Because of the lizard’s jokes about alchemy practice and how boyish I was looking, I developed a habit of walking around mouthing nonsense syllables to myself, hoping to hit on the spell that would make my final transformation into Riyamn possible. I also grew out of charmals. By the time I was ten, my horns were big enough to hold the front of my charmal away from my face. Anu Riyamn asked Ba if they couldn’t just cut my horns off, but Ba told her that nusjan horns were not the same as mountain sheep horns and that it would hurt me. I didn’t know if that was true, but I was happy with his answer. I was terrified by the idea of Anu Riyamn taking a saw to my head. For a while, I was stuck wearing a folded scarf wrapped around my head over my charmal, which was rather odd looking and uncomfortable when it was humid.

 

Until one day I was watching people pass through the alley below the house and I saw a man wearing a piece of fabric wrapped neatly around his head. I called Riyamn over. “Where’s he from?” I asked.

 

“The Kanaaf Archipelago, I think. Not the same part as Dr. Abal,” Riyamn said. “Why?”

 

“Do you think you could do that for me? Wrap my scarf like his turban, I mean. You’ve seen them up close, right?”

 

“You can’t wear that, Xhind!”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Well, it’s foreign, and it’s for men.”

 

“You wear Bilarni clothes,” I pointed out.

 

“That’s different. I have to, for school. And I wear Bilarni men’s clothes. You can’t wear men’s clothes, you’re a girl.”

 

“I already do wear boy’s clothes. I have to, for work,” I retorted. “Wearing a skirt in the quarry was stupid, and wearing a charmal when everyone can see what I’m hiding is stupid too.”

 

“But you can’t, you’re a girl. If you wear boy’s clothes, you’ll be cursed. Damned to hell.” Riyamn was horrified. Apparently he’d never seen me going into the shop wearing pants and a tunic, but then he was usually either at school, down the street studying, or asleep.

 

“Riyamn, I have horns on my head. I’m already cursed. I have much bigger problems than fashion. Wearing a turban would at least let me look normal and maybe everyone would stop staring at me.” And I would much prefer it to a charmal, but I didn’t say that.

 

“No they wouldn’t.”

 

“If you don’t want to help then just say so. I don’t need your help anyhow.”

 

“I’ll have to tell Ma and Ba what you’re doing.”

 

“Then you’ll be a rat,” I said, although it was kind of pointless. Ma and Ba would know as soon as they saw me, but Riyamn was starting to annoy me so much. He didn’t used to be so concerned with propriety, before he started going to school.

 

“You’re so childish,” he said.

 

“I know you are but what am I,” I said, and he stomped off.

 

I spent the evening practicing folding my charmal up and wrapping it around and around my head. I held a lamp up and looked at my reflection on the surface of a bucket of water. It was odd, but better. You couldn’t tell I had horns anymore, as long as I covered my temples to hide the bony lumps that ran up my temples to support my growing horns. I marched into the kitchen and stood in front of Maghris, who had surely known what I was doing. _Well, what do you think_ , I signed.

 

_It’s different, but better on you than the charmal, I think. It’s crooked though, come here and let me fix it._ I stepped closer and she re-wrapped my turban. _A little weird, but very fetching._

_Do you think Anu and Ibu Riyamn will let me wear it instead of the charmal?_ I asked.

 

_I don’t know, Xhind, but I will support you to them as much as I can._

_Thank you._

 

When Ba got home, he looked at me and burst out laughing.

 

“Don’t laugh and encourage her, it’s not funny,” Anu Riyamn said from the firepit where she was cooking dinner. She had just finished warning me in dire tones to wait till Yzid got home.

 

“It’s definitely funny. She looks like a short, brown Kanaaf islander.”

 

“She looks like a crossdressing foreign pervert,” Anu Riyamn shot back.

 

“Oh come on, it’s not that bad,” Ba said. “It hides her horns at least and the charmal hasn’t done that for a long time.”

 

“Somebody will see her! It makes all of us look bad but especially me. Tell her to take it off, she won’t listen to me anymore.”

 

Ba turned to me. “Little gazelle, do you want to take it off?” I shook my head no, terrified all the while. I was going to be in so much trouble. “She doesn’t want to,” he said to Anu.

 

“What is she the princess of Bilarn now? It doesn’t matter what she wants. You have no idea how to raise children, Yzid.”

“I raised plenty of ship’s boys and they turned out fine,” Ba said. “You can have her wear a charmal that’s proper for young ladies and doesn’t cover her or a turban that’s a little oddball and does cover her. Logically now, which is the better choice?”

 

“I screwed up somewhere, Yzid. She’s been contrary since the day she was born, but maybe if I managed to raise her better she wouldn’t have turned into a pervert. I don’t know if the other children are safe around her, especially Riyamn.”

 

“You didn’t do anything wrong Nehleh, she’s just being a kid. She’ll turn out all right. And so will Riyamn. There’s nothing to fear.”

 

“There’s everything to fear. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us when we’re old if something happens to Riyamn. It wouldn’t be so bad if he had other boys to play with and no nusjan around, but I worry about his health.”

 

“The doctor’s doing everything that can be done, and he had the boys from school to learn boyish things from. Everything else is up to God.”

 

“Lord knows I put my faith in him, I just worry.”

 

“Well don’t, it doesn’t do any good. That smells good, what is it?”

 

“Goat and pepper stew.”

 

“Mmmmm,” Ba said, and started up the stairs. Girlish shrieking and shouts of “Ba!” were soon heard from upstairs.

 

And that was the end of that. Anu grumbled but grudgingly accepted my turban, and I got to wear what I wanted at least some of the time. The price was that I had to go down under ground and squeeze through the crevice at weird hours of the night, but it got me out of the house and around other nusjan. It was a price I was willing to pay.

 

-          END -


End file.
